Explore to what extent The Great Gatsby is a Modernist novel

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Explore to what extent The Great Gatsby is a Modernist novel

The Great Gatsby, the first truly Modernist novel to find success in the United States, set the tone for the movement that defined American literature well into the present day. In Modernism, Fitzgerald found a way to define his world that would have been impossible in the Nineteenth-century Victorian style that still dominated American writing. In his style, portrayal of American morality and treatment of his characters, Fitzgerald left the Victorian era behind, creating a Modernist masterwork that still serves as a model for American fiction.

The gritty realism of William James and his contemporaries, and even the light-hearted tone of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, was too limited to allow Fitzgerald to portray the Jazz Age, a period in which dark fantasy reigned. Modernism offered a broader palette, a self-consciously surreal landscape in which life is viewed more metaphorically than meticulously detailed. Only through this lens could a central theme of the novel emerge: ‘Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, just out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound’. (9)

The eggs are more a product of Nick’s imagination than a realistic geographical description; by mixing in metaphor, Fitzgerald not only described the setting of his novel, but alludes to the area as a breeding ground for the events to come without revealing what will “hatch.”

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The darker side of New York, which Victorian writers would render as dirty and ugly as Dickensian London, becomes softer and more vague in Fitzgerald’s description: ‘[A] fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.’ (27)

The image, although of the underbelly of society, is still oddly beautiful. Fitzgerald creates a fantasy world in which anything is possible, an approach later used by ...

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